After the People Lights Have Gone Off (31 page)

She keeps saying that to herself.

•

The next time he pulls a strip of tape up from her arm, the triangle of skin comes up with it, dangling by a gummy thread.

This time he doesn’t cut himself.

It’s a simple game, really.

Three times in a row, by willpower alone, she holds onto her triangle of tape, the top of his right thigh opening up like the back of a butterflied shrimp, over and over, his meat dull and striated before the blood rushes in to cover it.

Like with her arm, he isn’t applying bandages or ointment or care to himself.

Fair’s fair.

The triangle either stays in place, a tiny island in a sea of blood, or it hang-gliders up into its sky.

But then she loses six times in a row, and he has to switch to the other arm.

At what’s either the second week or the third week, her family’s kitchen probably stacked with uneaten casseroles, their porch mounded with flower baskets, he brings a flashcard in with him.

On it is a hieroglyph, or an ideogram, or a cuneiform in ink.

She looks from it to his face, then back to the card.

He holds it up even with her eyes, and, moving slow again—this is his knife hand—he peels the tape from her mouth, from under her chin.

She licks her lips ravenously, never had any sense that was something she could long for so deeply.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

She’s been practicing. She’s made promises to herself. She knows her lines. This is the first step. This is her chance.

It doesn’t matter.

He holds the card closer. Waiting.

She narrows her eyes. She looks past the card to him.

“What do you want?” she says, off-script.

Nothing. No response.

“I’ve—I’ve got a daughter,” she says, remembering her plan. Her strategy.

“To trade?” he asks, a grin ghosting the corners of his mouth up.

She closes her eyes, looks away.

You can’t die from holding your breath, she tells herself. And you can’t die from just wanting to. Not with your arms taped down. Your legs. Not in this room.

Moving with what she wants to read as fatigue, he tears off a three-inch strip of tape and applies it, snicks the razor from the knife.

It’s just sounds to her, now.

It’s not really her body anymore.

He cuts deeper, until she has to agree that it is still her body.

It’s worth it. It makes her triangle of tape stay behind.

He cuts himself just as deep and has to tilt his face up, to keep his eyes from spilling.

She loves him a little, in thanks. And hates herself for that.

•

Next is her lower lip.

It’s the day the roll of tape runs out.

He studies the leftover cardboard tube, the spinout her daughter used to call it—right?—then nods, leans over, deposits it in the hole of her toilet.

Like everything that goes down there, it falls and it falls.

She shrugs like oh well. Nothing to do.

He doesn’t agree.

Instead of going back to his refrigerator for more tape, he uses what they have, what’s already there, on her mouth. But only after holding the flashcard up again. Giving her one more chance.

It’s still nothing to her. Less than nothing.

He stands to hold her forehead when he pushes the knife into the tape. And it’s good that he does. Otherwise the tip of the blade would be all over her face.

The triangle of her lower lip goes with the tape this time, and when it does she slings her head back, sees the afterburn of that ideogram on the ceiling. That hieroglyph. That cuneiform, that inkdoll, that Rorschach blot.

It hangs in the air before her for a moment then slips back to wherever it came from. Wherever it goes. Wherever it lives.

It’s been a month, at least. It has to have been.

She’s been replaced at work. Her family’s in mourning.

He stands there with her strip of tape in his hand, by his right thigh, a deep piece of her lower lip stuck to the tape, as rubbery as octopus meat, and he lets her scream.

This time when her tears slide down, they seep into the open wound her lip has become.

She screams through it. That she should have watched closer, she should have been better, she knows. She screams that she’s sorry. She screams that she hates him. She screams that she’s the wrong girl, can’t he see? It’s not her. He wants somebody else for this, whatever this is.

He just watches her. Studies her.

“What do you want?” she asks when she can, out of breath, blood and saliva stringing off the bottom of her chin. Onto her wrists. Under the tape.

Up here, she tells him with her eyes. Keep your eyes right here.

He looks down the backside of the tape he’s holding and pinches her bloodless triangle of skin up from it. He inspects it like it’s a bug. Like it’s piece of a bug, and he’s trying to guess at its true form, its lifecycle. What it eats and what it doesn’t. What it looks like sleeping.

And then he folds the tape shut over it, presses it tight, giving it the burial it deserves, and when it makes its wet fibrous sound she feels another jolt of pain.

Her bottom lip’s discharge goes clear hours after he leaves. Clear like the fluid in her IV tube. It’s what she’s made of, anymore, she knows.

She tilts her head back to try to keep it in, and stays that way for most of the night. Or what she thinks is the night.

•

The next two weeks it’s that same idiot of a flashcard. That same hateful symbol, sign, letter.

He brings new tape, just as chilled.

She’s taken to laughing when he has to cut himself. To making herself laugh.

She tells him his lap is what the mall Santa for cats must look like. She tells him to go slower, so she can watch, so she can hear. She stabs her tongue into the hole in her lip to stay awake.

The tops of her arms are ruined by now, a patchwork of bloody triangles, all pointing at her bicep. The IV is spiked into the top of her foot. She doesn’t remember it happening. Or her daughter’s name, either.

She tells herself that’s the real pain, that that hurts the worst. But then she’ll see the knife again, from across the room.

He holds the card in front of her and she tries spitting on it, just to get a new one. Just to switch the station, please. Her spit doesn’t make it past her chin, even. Just her right wrist.

He saws the front of her scrub-shirt open, lays a strip of tape on the pale top of her left breast.

She lays her head back, stares at her favorite spot on the ceiling.

Moments later both cups of her bra warm with blood, not just the left, like she was expecting.

It’s something. And maybe not her bra, even, so there.

She doesn’t even look down to see if she won or lost.

On the ceiling, she moves her eyes in the brushstrokes of the hieroglyph, and she isn’t sure whether she’s telling herself to do it or if she’s watching herself do it.

In school, she’d studied business, not ancient cultures. Not languages. Not art. Not even international business. She only knows of cuneiform from a project in sixth grade. But they were writing in English, for it. Their boyfriend’s names. With hearts they had to smuggle onto their tablets, hide until the clay dried.

“You’ve got the wrong girl,” she tells him again, just speaking straight up, her throat stretched tight, her words easy in spite of that, because her flesh is less every day. “You can keep doing this, but I’ll never guess.”

“You don’t have to guess,” he says, his voice smooth like he’s been talking all day. “You already know. You just don’t know it yet.”

By the time she looks up, he’s already limped away.

His cuts are just as infected as hers. Just as festering. Just as boiling with pus.

She wonders if this is love.

She watches a bubble climb her clear IV tube then stop at the incline.

She tries to suck with the veins in her foot but the bubble is stubborn.

In it is a world, she knows. One she could live in.

•

He has to shake her awake. It’s later. It’s always later. Never before. No matter how hard she tries.

Her legs have hairs pushing up through the scabs. She imagines a giant, sloppy dog walking in in its lanky way, licking the dried blood from her. Licking and licking. Watching her the whole while.

She’s pretty sure the clear fluid coming through her tube is saliva, too. His, probably. He’s been saving for months, before finally working up the nerve to grab her.

Maybe this is sex, for him. For somebody like him.

Maybe it’s better.

He lets her shoulders go as soon as she’s awake.

“Hey, Billy,” she says, her voice light, noncommittal. “Hey,  Ron.”

It’s her new game.

He doesn’t play along.

“Frederick,” she adds, over-enunciating by about half a mile. It’s hilarious.

He holds the flashcard up.

They’re onto her scalp, now. It’s been re-shaved. She’s having to trust him, about whether the grey triangle is staying in place or not.

But she does. Trust him.

“Jonathan Mutragen,” she says, with all proper flair. “Junior.” She almost smiles from it. “The third. ‘Esquire.’”

When she looks back to the silence he’s emanating, that she can feel roiling off him, he’s lowered the card a bit, and he’s breathing deep. His eyes alive like he’s getting away with something, here. No: like he’s gotten away with something.

“Jonathan?” she says, honestly scared for the first time in weeks.

He flips the card over in his hand.

On the back is the hieroglyph’s meaning. The ideogram’s meaning. What the Sumerians had meant, when they pressed it into clay.

Three.

The most complicated, useless, ornamental three there ever was in the world. In the whole history of man.

She swallows, looks up, and feels her face flush with accomplishment.

It’s the first day they don’t play the game.

Because she guessed right.

She stamps her feet as much as she can. In celebration. She pees her cathether tube full, imagines it frothing in there, lapping at the sides in joy.

“Three!” she yells out to him in his dark corridor, his black catwalk, his hiding place. “Three three three third!”

It doesn’t matter that he stays back there. That he doesn’t respond. She can see his project, now. The dim outline of it. There are right answers to his questions. And those answers, they’re answers she couldn’t know.

He’s improving her. He’s making her better. He’s making her reach inside for what he needs, for the trivial, impossible solutions to his arbitrary problems, but she’s not reaching into herself. She’s reaching into some place deeper. Some place the world’s forgotten how to access.

Until him.

He’s turning her into an oracle. He’s bleeding the truth from her.

It’s what any crazy person would think.

The next day—she’s back to days—he uses a ballpoint pen to write on the palm of his hand.

It’s numbers. And letters. Operators. Blue ink, calluses.

Algebra, trig, calculus, something far past any chalkboard she’s ever seen.

R(5,5)=

An obvious blank on the right side.

She looks up to him.

•

The game when it gets to her collarbones hurts in the same way the dentist used to hurt, when she lived in that world. When that world was real. She can hear the narrow point of the blade scraping bone.

None of those grey triangles stay on. Not even one.

It doesn’t matter.

Soon she’ll be The Girl Without Skin. The Twice Naked Woman. The Lady Made of Pain.

The One Who Disappeared.

The Oracle of Open Flesh.

He moves onto the virgin expanse of her back. What he can get to, around the chair.

Her shoulder blades. The ridges of her spine.

She tries to imagine herself as somebody else. Somebody else getting a tattoo. The most complicated tattoo.

She cries afterwards, just from habit. Some of the tears are making their way to her right wrist, she notices. Under the tape.

Because her daughter would want her to try, wouldn’t she?

Whatever her daughter’s name is. Or was.

No, is. Is is is.

Always is.

When he comes in next, he’s got the roll of tape, the utility knife, but a pad of paper, too. Graph paper.

Meaning the answer to R(5,5), it’s more complicated than three was.

She looks away.

Not because she doesn’t want to try. Not because luck isn’t real. It’s because he’ll have to remove her tape to let her try, which would start that tape over.

“Red on bottom,” he prompts. Like reminding her. Priming her.

She tastes this, considers this.

He’s talking about the graph. The one she guesses she’s going to need map colors for. To make it red on bottom.

She chuckles in her chest and her shoulders move with it.

“The tongue, then,” he says, obviously disappointed, putting the pen back in its pocket, the sound of that plastic barrel on fabric deafening, an avalanche, each thread a rope, the pen’s yellow skin impossibly rough.

“I’m sorry,” she says, not meaning it, and then her daughter stands up on her toes, whispers something in her ear.

44?

She repeats it, but not to him, to her. Wherever she’s scampered off to. Whatever her name is. Was.

“Forty four?” he asks, his breath coming hard and sudden, his eyes too full.

She remembers him, she comes back to him.

“Nothing,” she says.

“Forty four,” he says again, insisting, and reaches into his back pocket. “Ramsey’s Theorum. ”

The strip of paper with R(5,5)= has the blank filled in. With a range of numbers from 43 to 49.

“It’s a range because it’s unsolveable,” he says, watching her eyes. “That’s as close as we can get.” He breathes in, breathes back out. Adds, “Until now.”

She shakes her head, amused.

At the end, that’s the main thing left.